During the Fall I love to go to Cape May New Jersey. The raptor/bird migration is great. My friend Wayne turned me on to the location a while back, and I've gone every year since.
This year I have been once so far on September 24-25 (2016). It was a little early for big numbers of hawks, and the weather was not great for it either.
The best setup for hawk migration is when a cold front moves through, pushing birds east, and the prevailing winds are out of the Northwest. This pattern pushes birds towards the east coast and the way Cape May and the Delaware Bay are the birds run out of land to fly over, since there's water everywhere else and they tend to stop over on the cape.
But it's Fall and it's Cape May so not great here still has the potential to be good.
On this morning there were a few young osprey flying around over The Meadows and along the shore, over the Atlantic Ocean just at the edge of the beach.
The young osprey aren't very skilled at hunting yet and it takes them a lot of effort to catch fish. Here the osprey has caught 2 small fish, after trying numerous times to get something. I also saw dolphins in this same area and they were hunting as well. I probably saw more than a dozen of the dolphins over the course of a couple of hours.
(updated - 10/11/2016 with another image)
The ideal time to see hawks migrating is when the weather is right, and during the first couple of weeks in October based on my experience...
To see more of my Cape May photos click on this image to see my flickr set.
-Jon
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1 comments:
Good post.
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